Handel by Jonathan Keates Read Free Book Online Page B

character of the entire work, essentially a series of vocal concerto movements, relentless in its momentum and dazzling in its grandeur of design.
    The stylistic synthesis is not only between Handel and Corelli but draws together elements from the composer’s German church training of Halle days and features which suggest that he must have begun to study the work of earlier Italian masters, Antonio Stradella, Giacomo Carissimi, Giovanni Paolo Colonna (in whom Boyce was later to detect an obvious Handelian model) and maybe even works by Monteverdi and his accomplished assistant at St Mark’s, Alessandro Grandi, whose own strikingly idiosyncratic Dixit Dominus was published in 1629. The sturdy cantus firmus of ‘ donec ponam inimicos tuos ’ in the first movement could pass as easily for a Latin psalm tone as for a Lutheran chorale (it is not unlike Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme ) but the pattern of contrasts between soli and five-part chorus, and the double fugue setting ‘Tu es sacerdos in aeternum’ marching against the rushing semi-quavers of ‘ secundum ordinem Melchisedech ’ are quintessentially Italian in idiom. This very movement Handel was to use again, more than thirty years later, in Israel in Egypt , a work that achieves the same sort of fusion, albeit on a far grander scale, through the remarkable diversity of its allusions.
    There is no record of a first performance for the Dixit Dominus , but since it forms part of the Vesper Offices,the ingenious suggestion has been made that Handel intended it as part of a far larger service, at which his settings of two other vesper psalms, Laudate Pueri and Nisi Dominus , would also be given. A Handelian Vespers, to place beside Monteverdi’s set of 1610 and Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore is an attractive idea, though nearly three months divide the composition of Dixit Dominus and Laudate Pueri , finished on 8 July. The theory is that together with the motet Saeviat tellus inter rigores they may all have been given at the Carmelite church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo, in special commemoration of deliverance from the recent earthquakes. The only piece of Handel’s, however, which has a definite link with such a commemoration is the motet Donna che in ciel for soprano, chorus and orchestra.
    A more recent theory suggests that the Dixit Dominus was written as a psalmus in tempore belli , to be sung in the presence of the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro Tellez, Duke of Uceda, at the hill town of Frascati north of Rome. On 20 April 1707, fearing the advance of an imperial army against Rome itself, the Duke, inviting fifty guests to join him, had fled the city. Once safely ensconced at Frascati, he offered his friends a banquet to celebrate the feast of St Philip and St James on 1 May, a red-letter day in the Spanish calendar. The turbulence at the heart of Handel’s Dixit setting, whether in the swooping string arpeggios of its opening movement or the jaggedly dramatic setting of ‘ Conquassabit caput in terra multorum ’ (he shall wound the heads of many upon earth), suggests a context of war rather than the earthquakes for the psalm’s first performance, though once again no documentary evidence supports the idea of such a première.
    Whatever their purpose the two other psalms show us that the Roman Handel had begun as he meant to go on. The Laudate Pueri uses the same technique of contrasted textures (a florid solo soprano opening, for example, balanced by rich choral writing) and explores a bewildering selection of keys (including a doom-laden switch from F to F sharp in the sixteen-bar Quis sicut Dominus ) before homing to the original D major in the Gloria. This final movement repeats the traditional ‘As it was in the beginning’ device, more deftly used in the Dixit Dominus , in which the sense of the words is mirrored in a reprise of the opening material. A similar ploy marks the close of